2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the Common Era by David Archard, Trevor A. Hart, Visit Amazon's Nigel Rapport

2000 Years and past brings jointly the most eminent thinkers of our time - experts in philosophy, theology, anthropology and cultural conception. In a horizon-scanning paintings, they appear back and forth to discover what hyperlinks us to the matrix of the Judaeo-Christian culture from which Western cultural identification has evolved.Their plural reflections elevate looking out questions about how we stream from previous to destiny - and approximately who 'we' are. What do the catastrophes of the 20 th century symbolize for hopes of development? Can put up - Enlightment humanism and its suggestion of human nature live to tell the tale with out religion? If the 'numinous magic international capitalism' is our personal big shadow solid overseas, does that shadow provide wish sufficient of a communal destiny? Has the fashionable, secularized West now outgrown its originating religion matrix? usually debatable and infrequently visionary, those seven new essays ask: how can we inform - and rewrite - the tale of the typical period? brought by means of Paul Gifford, and mentioned in a full of life dialogic end, they upload their exact voices to a debate of profound and pressing topicality.

From the illustrious George Washington and the notorious J. Edgar Hoover to impressive imaginer Walt Disney and undesirable boy of baseball Ty Cobb, Freemasons have prompted each point of yankee existence. but this mystery society continues to be as debatable and mysterious as ever. during this ebook, you are going to examine the reality about:The strength and that means at the back of the symbols, rites, and ritualsAlleged connections with Jack the Ripper, the KKK, and the Holy GrailFreemasons vs.

Synopsis The tendency of non secular authority to hunt to dominate instead of serve, and the fight of these who desire to hinder the erosion in their God-given freedom of sense of right and wrong -- those shape the center of the very own and candid account in drawback of sense of right and wrong. The scene of fight is in the club of a particular faith: Jehovah's Witnesses.

Extra resources for 2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the Common Era (2002)

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Only a future 21 jürgen moltmann for which we can hope can give meaning to life in historical time, to historical acts, and to suffering in history. ’ In this solemn, religiously charged sense, ‘future’ became for the modern world the new paradigm of transcendence. The nineteenth century, which began, as it were, in 1789, after the marked caesura in Europe, and ended in 1914, was indeed an age of beginnings, utopias and revolutions. What earlier had been no more than something to be hoped for was now to be realized.

Consider some examples. The French positivist Auguste Comte thought that liberal values were suitable only in a specific phase of human development, and looked forward to a hierarchical, technocratic, post-liberal society in which there would be no more liberty in questions of morality than there is in chemistry. 4 Karl Marx – one of many critics of liberal individualism to have been deeply influenced by the French positivists – accepted the Comtean view that liberal values were transitional phenomena in human development, using it to envision another post-liberal regime – one that was classless and egalitarian but equally grounded in the progress of science and technology.

More, it holds out to mankind a promise of salvation that is a secular version of Christianity’s. History might seem a succession of crises and catastrophes, often tragic and more commonly farcical, in which civilized life in all of its many varieties is recurrently derailed by human folly. But for Enlightenment humanists, as for Christians, this sorry tale is actually the working out of a larger design. The end of history will be a universal civilization, from which tyranny, poverty and superstition have been expunged.